Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

A POPULAR OUTLINE

PREFACE

The pamphlet here presented to the reader was written in the
spring of 1916, in Zurich. In the conditions in which I was
obliged to work there I naturally suffered somewhat from a
shortage of French and English literature and from a serious
dearth of Russian literature. However, I made use of the
principal English work on imperialism, the book by J. A. Hobson,
with all the care that, in my opinion, that work deserves.

This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist
censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself
strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic
analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary
observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an
allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language—to
which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have
recourse whenever they took up the pen to write a “legal”
work.

It is painful, in these days of liberty, to re-read the
passages of the pamphlet which have been distorted, cramped,
compressed in an iron vice on account of the censor. That the
period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution;
that social-chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds)
is the utter betrayal of socialism, complete desertion to the
side of the bourgeoisie; that this split in the working-class
movement is bound up with the objective conditions of
imperialism, etc.—on these matters I had to speak in a
“slavish” tongue, and I must refer the reader who is interested
in the subject to the articles I wrote abroad in 1914-17, a new
edition of which is soon to appear. In order to show the reader,
in a guise acceptable to the
censors, how shamelessly untruthful
the capitalists and the social-chauvinists who have deserted to
their side (and whom Kautsky opposes so inconsistently) are on
the question of annexations; in order to show how shamelessly
they screen the annexations of their
capitalists, I was forced to quote as an example—Japan!
The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan, and
Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia
or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians, for Korea.

I trust that this pamphlet will help the reader to understand
the fundamental economic question, that of the economic essence
of imperialism, for unless this is studied, it will be
impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern
politics.